A far cry from the “Main Street of Black America” of times past, by 2015, 125th Street counted 77 chain retailers and 15 commercial banks.1 But the shocking tide of urban change is by no means unique to Harlem. Walking through the streets of New York City, from Manhattan to the Rockaways, from the Bronx to downtown Brooklyn, block after block, each empty retail window and each “premium residences” banner at construction sites remind us that the forces of capital are constantly at work. They are behind the lavish towers along the Williamsburg waterfront and behind the boarded-up storefronts along 5th Avenue, behind the new megamalls in the Bronx and the ravaged empty lots of Coney Island. Across the globe, wherever we turn, whether in Shanghai or in London, in Berlin or in Los Angeles, we see capital at work, in its relentless struggle to conquer every corner of our cities and to extract profit from them. Welcome to the urban space under capitalism: it is a space that, as French philosopher Henri Lefebvre argued, has been entirely occupied and commodified by the forces of capital. It is a space whose “urban fabric, with its multiple networks of communication and exchange, is part of the means of production.”2 It is a space where everything, from the busy office districts to the quiet housing wards, from the seedy industrial areas to the new up-and-coming neighborhoods, is part and parcel of capital. The shape of our cities is the physical materialization of these forces at work, and the very process of city building is nothing but a reflection of capital’s compulsory need to ensure its survival. This is what neo-Marxist scholars like David Harvey call the “urbanization of capital”:3 capitalism can survive only by subjugating more and more of the urban experience under its rules.
We live in the era of the most rapid urbanization in human history, an era in which our cities are playing an ever more strategic role in facilitating the accumulation, consumption, and reproduction of capital.4 After all, what else is the city if not “a giant machine for making money”?5 Anyone who pays a rent or collects a rent from a property he or she owns knows all too well what I am talking about. And in times where cities are gradually substituting nations as global economic engines, city building has become a very profitable venture. This is why private players and local governments are eager to invest monumental resources in the production and promotion of this ever more sophisticated, ever more seductive money-making machine. And the space created by capital is a very seductive space indeed—provided you have the money. Yes, because the driving motor of the process of capitalist urbanization is the quest for profit. And the transformation of the city into a pricey commodity for sale is one of the most profitable ventures in this phase of capitalism. Despite what we may have heard in the campaign speeches of this or that elected official, one of the fundamental duties once they are in office will be to create the conditions where urban land can be turned into profit. This is the key to a deeper understanding of the functioning of our cities. This explains why, despite their political color or campaign promises, elected officials in successful global cities from London to New York, from San Francisco to Beijing, routinely adopt strikingly similar, ubiquitous policies, whose bottom line, apart from a few tweaks here and there, is always one and the same: the redevelopment of underperforming property markets (i.e., working-class or ex-manufacturing districts) into high-revenue urban land that can accommodate the most profitable uses (swanky residential enclaves, high-end retail rows) and attract the most profitable consumers (international companies and their employees, wealthy newcomers, tourists). In more technical terms: to create an environment that is capable of accommodating new cycles of capital investment and profit, a spatial arrangement that is suitable for the production, consumption, and reproduction of capital.
In New York City, we know all too well how this works on the ground: low-income neighborhoods and former industrial areas are relentlessly being transformed into more upscale residential enclaves with amenable parks and high-end retail, driving up the overall cost of land and pushing low- and middle-income long-time residents out of their communities. But this process is global. From Beijing’s hutong settlements to London’s Docklands, from Berlin’s Soviet-era Plattenbauten to Chicago’s public housing projects, in capitalist cities, demolition, displacement, and reconstruction are the order of the day. This is why the process of urban development is a highly contested political process, as demonstrated by the fierce protests of grassroots activists fighting for their communities from the global North to the global South. These groups, often representing low-income and working-class communities living at the margins of the political arena, are engaged in constant crusades against government plans, sometimes to preserve the existence of affordable homes, at other times to oppose the demolition of beloved historical buildings or to prevent the placement of hazardous facilities in their neighborhoods. Capital’s tendency to make space a commodity in the marketplace is the harbinger of severe social conflicts, and the history of capitalist urbanization is nothing but a centuries-old war between powerful groups seeking to extract profit from the urban land and ordinary citizens who value their space simply as a basis for living and creating communities, and who are engaged in a perpetual fight to keep it that way.6
From the suburbanization of the United States in the 1950s, through the entrepreneurial urban regimes established after the global financial crisis of the early 1970s, to the “back to the city” movement starting in the 1980s, capital has ensured its survival through a constant writing and rewriting of the form of urban America.7
In the booming post–World War II era, which in the United States was marked by a Fordist economy based on mass production and mass consumption, the demands of capital contributed to the most radical restructuring of space in the history of the country, and suburbanization became the key allowing for the absorption of immense capital surpluses. A system of high wages and welfare provisions contributed to the creation of a rather affluent, consumerist middle class, which escaped the city in search of the comforts of the suburbs, while the state, in concert with the oil and automobile industries, was responsible for the production of an automobile-centric sprawling geography of highway networks, suburban villages, and shopping centers surrounded by vast parking lots to sustain an unprecedented consumption of oil and cars.
In major US cities, this was also the era of urban renewal, an era of unprecedented public works that have changed the shape of urban America for good. With the passing of the Housing Act in 1949, the federal state initiated programs of “slum clearance” that obliterated hundreds of working-class neighborhoods across the country. It also massively subsidized the construction of new housing for the poor and the working class, often in the form of segregated “towers in the park” public housing estates—the infamous “projects” that have been so loathed from Chicago to New Orleans, and that urban activist and author Jane Jacobs defined as “worse centers of delinquency, vandalism, and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.”8 Urban renewal has left an enduring legacy in the space of major American urban areas: the annihilation of once-bustling inner-city neighborhoods has left permanent scars in the urban fabric, while most public housing complexes have resulted in islands of decay surgically segregated from the rest of the city.
The temporary balance of post–World War II economic growth did not last long, however. The Arab oil embargo and the global property market crash of 1973, followed by the collapse of the very banking institutions that had powered the post–World War II property bubble, precipitated the system into a major global crisis. And “to the degree that urbanization had become part of the problem, so it had to be part of the solution. The result was a fundamental transformation of the urban process after 1973.”9 The dismantling of the welfarist regime of post–World War II America and the dissolution of federal commitments to city building brought about yet more transformations in the shape of urban America. This shift was epitomized by the handling of New York City’s near default in 1975, which culminated with the notorious “Ford to City: Drop Dead” front page of the Daily News, in which President Ford likened the city’s spending for health care, education, and other forms of public service to an “insidious disease.”10 The handling of this crisis signaled the onset of a process of aggressive neo-liberalization of urban governance in the United States: shrinking federal subsidies left municipal governments no other choice but to rely on their own strengths (their local fiscal capacity) to sustain their economies, and this made them increasingly dependent on the private initiative for the financing of public works. In these years, private actors became increasingly involved in the making of urban policy, while the local authorities embraced the role of facilitators of private investment through the creation of public–private partnerships and generous business-oriented fiscal policies.11 While cities started engaging in bidding wars with each other for investment capital from the private sector, business and property developers learned to rely on the public government for sweetheart deals and publicly funded financial incentives and tax benefits. In light of these phenomena, David Harvey speaks of a new “entrepreneurial” form of governance that emerged in these crucial years.12 In this entrepreneurial era, the aim of local governments shifted from the provision of welfare to sustain consumption to the pursuit of “growth,” especially in the form of local tax returns from real estate development.13
A series of events in the 1970s marked this shift in planning paradigms in the United States. In 1974, Congress terminated the Urban Renewal Program that had been launched in 1949, while a moratorium was imposed on federal housing subsidies, putting an end to the public housing programs. These programs were substituted by federal grants whose target shifted from large-scale housing plans to site-specific, privately led development projects. Such policy shifts brought about remarkable changes to urban planning strategies in American cities, and New York was definitely no exception.
In New York City, the flight of the middle class to the suburbs in the 1960s and the shrinking of industrial jobs across the metropolitan area had led to the progressive erosion of the municipal tax base—one of the very foundations upon which the strong local welfare state had ensured its survival. A radical shift in public policy occurred in the aftermath of the city’s near bankruptcy in 1975, when the City Planning Commission (CPC) lost its control over the city’s capital budget, and its resources were severely curtailed. Privately led development efforts were strongly encouraged and touted as the antidote to the failure of government bureaucracies. Cuts in social services were paralleled by generous tax incentives to large corporate and financial institutions, while urban policy started focusing on creating “business-friendly” environments to attract large corporations and their employees, and on promoting large-scale development plans as catalysts for consuming visitors and a new urban middle class.
This resulted in a new course for land use and planning regulations, which became more accommodating both to private investment and more generally to the demands of the market. It also led to a burgeoning of new city agencies committed to subsidizing private investment throughout the city.
The Public Development Corporation (PDC), a quasi-independent local development corporation created in 1966 (it was renamed the Economic Development Corporation, or EDC, in 1991), was aimed at encouraging development with the sale of city-owned properties to private investors. From 1966 to 1991, it became the powerful force behind the most spectacular development projects in Manhattan, including the revamping of Times Square and the rehabilitation of the South Street Seaport. As reconstituted in 1991, the EDC’s primary functions included the development, marketing, selling, and managing of city-owned land; the financing of private development plans; the establishment of incentives for business retention and attraction; and the provision of financial assistance for developers. While the EDC acted as a catalyst for private development, the Department of City Planning, the government department responsible for preparing land use plans, became more and more dependent on the dictates of the EDC’s agenda. The PDC/EDC worked closely with the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), another public authority created in 1968 by the New York State Urban Development Corporation Act. In 1975, the Urban Development Corporation was reorganized and its mission shifted from developing housing to facilitating mixed-use developments that included retail and office uses.
Under the administration of Abraham Beame (1974–1977), the channeling of financial incentives into large private development plans in downtown Manhattan went hand in hand with Housing Commissioner Roger Starr’s controversial policies of “planned shrinkage” in the South Bronx and in other disadvantaged neighborhoods, a strategy which consisted of the deliberate withdrawal of city services and investments from blighted neighborhoods to encourage the exodus of the poor. By the 1980s, 26% of rental apartments, especially in Harlem, the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the Lower East Side, were in arrears, and many were abandoned or torched by their landlords, as they deemed that the buildings were worth more for the insurance money than as sources of income. By the mid-1970s, the Bronx had 120,000 fires per year, for an average of 30 fires every two hours. Forty percent of the housing in the area was destroyed. The net loss of housing from 1970 through 1984 amounted to 360,000 units.14 By 1979, the city had taken ownership of over 100,000 housing units that had been foreclosed or abandoned, making the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) the second-largest landlord in the city. In the years of Ed Koch (1978–1989), the city handed out massive tax breaks and incentives to large corporations, subsidizing one of the most remarkable office building development booms ever recorded in Manhattan. In these years, private developers could take advantage of a broad range of tax incentives for new construction. The Industrial and Commercial Incentives Board (ICIB), although initially intended to serve as a tool to revive the manufacturing industry, was soon employed as a catalyst for a wave of speculative construction of office buildings in midtown and downtown Manhattan.15 In the words of labor writer Kim Moody, the influx of the first affluent white professionals in once off-limits areas of Manhattan like the Lower East Side in the early 1980s constituted “the safety valve for the vast army of well-paid professionals who populate the city’s central districts.”16 This influx was a direct result of these shifts in policy, and in particular of a reorganization of the city’s tax incentive programs, notably with the creation in 1971 of the 421-a tax abatements for new residential construction17 and the extension of the J-51 tax exemption for the conversion of low-income housing to upscale condominium buildings and co-ops.18
Years of incentives to luxury development resulted in a growing dearth of affordable housing in Manhattan, which became particularly severe in the late 1980s. During Koch’s first term, 81,000 units of affordable housing had disappeared as a result of demolition, conversion, or gentrification.19 Paralleling the growth in the luxury market in Manhattan was the decline of districts like Harlem, the Bronx, and parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Staggering criminality, housing abandonment, and poverty in these areas contributed to make New York City a national symbol of urban decay.20 As a response to the housing crisis, in 1986 Koch announced a 10-year, $5.1-billion city-financed program to support the privately led production or rehabilitation of 252,000 low- and moderate-income housing units. Koch’s housing plan eventually managed to rehabilitate or build a staggering 150,000 homes, contributing to the economic recovery of vast swaths of city land that had fallen into disrepair over the years.21 Starting in the early 1980s, the real estate market started to rebound on the back of a strengthening national economy, and Koch presided over an array of remarkable development projects, mostly located in Manhattan, to accommodate the extraordinary growth of employees in the city’s finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) industries. Through the EDC/PDC and the UDC, federal subsidies for economic development were used to subsidize major image-enhancing projects such as the South Street Seaport, Battery Park City, the Javits Convention Center, and hotel construction in Times Square to catalyze tourism in the city. But the development boom ended abruptly with the stock market crash of 1987: the city was left with empty office buildings and vacant flats, rising unemployment in the financial and business sectors, a steep collapse in real estate values, and a recession that lasted until 1991.
David Dinkins (1990–1993), who took office as the recession unfolded, launched a 1990 National Urban Summit—a plea for more federal aid to cities, which brought together 35 mayors from cities across the United States. The effort proved fruitless, as federal money to municipalities continued to drop throughout the 1980s and 1990s, following a trend that had been in motion since the 1970s.
As former US attorney Rudolph Giuliani (1993–2001) took office, he ignited a new wave of fiscal austerity with cuts across the board on municipal services, which included curtailing the programs for affordable housing construction initiated by Koch. Giuliani stopped city hall from purchasing tax-foreclosed properties and introduced the “Building Blocks!” program in 1994, which was designed to return city-owned property to private entrepreneurs or community-based not-for-profit groups. During the Giuliani years, the number of affordable housing units in the city dropped precipitously: in only 2 years, from 1996 to 1998, over 1.3 million affordable units were lost, according to Moody.22 Almost 50,000 market-rate new units were built between 1994 and 1999, but none of them were really affordable to middle-income families.23 Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to retain large companies and banking and financial institutions in the city, while corporate tax rates were aggressively curtailed to encourage development in midtown and Lower Manhattan.
Giuliani was followed by Michael Bloomberg, who served from 2002 to 2013 and performed as another distinctly “pro-growth” mayor: with the most aggressive urban development agenda since the times of Robert Moses, the Department of City Planning under his control has rezoned over one-third of the whole New York metropolitan area, re-engineering immense swaths of New York City’s working-class, manufacturing, and waterfront areas into brand-new, mixed-use developments. But this is a story I will tell in chapter 4. And the new mayor in office, Bill de Blasio, hasn’t detached himself from the grand ambitions of his predecessors, making rezoning across the board the centerpiece of his planning agenda, as we will see in chapter 7.
Manhattan is the primary locus of global capitalism, the most voracious force for change in history. Best to pick a different place to try to render fixed and solid that which inexorably melts into air.24
No phrasing can describe decades of whirlwind urban transformations in New York City better than “creative destruction.” Across different phases of capitalism, from the Keynesian era of post–World War II economic expansion to the postindustrial era of rampant neo-liberalism starting in the 1970s, the relentless destruction of traces of old New York has constantly paved the way to a brand-new, more profitable city. Be it through the obliteration of working-class districts to make room for towering housing projects in the times of urban renewal or through the construction of slender high-rise condos and green promenades along waterfronts that were once home to bustling port activities in the times of Bloomberg, the city has constantly endeavored to find new ways to create profit for land owners and developers through a relentless process of destruction and rebuilding.
But this history of constant change is by no means a New York prerogative. The oxymoron “creative destruction,”25 popularized by Schumpeter in 1942, captures the functioning of capitalism in its centuries-long evolution: the process of relentless transformation and innovation that is implicit in capitalism “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”26 This also applies to the process of capitalist urbanization, which, as Lefebvre argued, is driven by the dictates of capital profitability under conditions of shifting social, economic, and cultural circumstances.27 The production of space under capitalism is characterized by a relentless tendency toward the destruction of obsolete (i.e., unprofitable or underperforming) space and the constant engineering of a brand-new space allowing for a profitable “excavation of value.”28 Our cities are arenas of relentless processes of creative destruction, “insofar as their constitutive socio-spatial forms—from buildings and the built environment to land‐use systems, networks of production and exchange, and metropolitan‐wide infrastructural arrangements—are sculpted and continually reorganized in order to enhance the profit‐making capacities of capital.”29 The incessant restructuring of the built environment is a reflection of capital’s ability to constantly find new avenues to reproduce itself.
According to urban scholar Rachel Weber, “capital circulates through the built environment in a dynamic and erratic fashion. At various points in its circulation, the built environment is junked, abandoned, destroyed, and selectively reconstructed.”30 Whenever space is destroyed, rearranged, or recreated from scratch, capital is extending its reach to incorporate more and more of the urban land under its grip.
The consequence of capital’s push for constant innovations, however, is not only the obliteration of specific property markets and built legacies, but also a relentless disruption of existing communities, social ties, and cultural identities. In the recent history of New York City, this happened during the era of urban renewal, with the aforementioned passing of the Housing Act in 1949 and the adoption of a new zoning resolution in 1961, both responsible for the wholesale demolition of old working-class districts and their substitution with modernist public housing estates, and with the creation of a whole new sprawling infrastructural system during the era of suburbanization. It happened again during the “back to the city” era of urban upgrading and rampant gentrification of inner-city districts since the 1980s, when cities experienced an out-migration of industry workers and an in-migration of middle-class “pioneers” who embraced the diversity, freedom, and “authenticity” of the postindustrial inner city.31
In the following chapters, I will show how the creative destruction of New York City has been advanced in recent years, and specifically under the administrations of Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio. This time, it was done through a systematic use of amendments of old zoning regulations, which has managed to unlock development potential in what were once unprofitable or underperforming property markets across the city, leading to one of the most remarkable building booms in the history of New York. While in the times of Robert Moses creative destruction went under the name of urban renewal, in the times of Bloomberg and de Blasio it goes under the name of rezoning.
Behind the building and rebuilding of New York City, we see capital at work in its relentless effort to subjugate more and more of the urban space under its rules. But the ravenous appetite of capital is not limited to the physical space of our cities alone. The forces of capital are striving to conquer all other possible dimensions of our urban experience: they not only shape the material form of the built environment around us—streets, squares, and buildings—they also condition our social routines and daily habits, and even influence our very personal perceptions of what living in the city is, or ought to be. In other words, the imperatives of capital accumulation dominate the physical, social, and symbolic space of our cities. If, as Lefebvre said, “space is a social product,”32 then under capitalism the production of a distinctive material infrastructure (physical space), as well as the manufacturing of specific narratives and representations of space (symbolic space) and the development of specific policy instruments and regulations (social space), is dominated by the logic of capital profitability. In sum: we inhabit a space that has been designed by capital and that is fundamental to its survival.33
As such, the space of our cities becomes a commodity in its own right. And cities, just like any other commodity, are produced, marketed, and consumed. We are all, to some extent, caught in this never-ending cycle of production and consumption of the urban space. But under capitalism, certain powerful groups play a particularly crucial role in it. As I will explain in the following paragraphs, the production and consumption of our cities have a tendency to be commanded by powerful social groups of producers and consumers. They are the ones who hold all the cards of the urban development game.
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” wrote George Orwell in his 1945 dystopian novel Animal Farm. A retired lady in El Barrio may well have the same constitutional rights as her landlord, but does she have the same legal staff and financial means when it comes to fighting in court against a two-week eviction notice? And when it comes to planning for the future of their community, be it in Harlem or in Brooklyn, are the voices of local grassroots activists being heard just as loud and clear as those of well-connected multinational developing firms?
Every day we witness the striking transformations occurring in our cities. We observe shiny towers rise to the sky while the grocery store and the shoemaker next door shut down. We see our rents soar while our salaries dwindle. And we realize that someone else is calling the shots. Yes, because the production of the space in our cities is commanded by a very selected elite of landlords, developers and financiers, always in search of strategies to boost the market value of urban land. And this—like it or not—is one of the most powerful rationales for the process we call “urban development.”
Theirs is not necessarily a totalitarian, Soviet-style endeavor: the transformations we see around us are the result of clashes, compromises, or cooperations of a number of different interest groups, from the powerful developer to the local councilperson, from the state government to the local community association. Many times a developer may come with a plan that is strongly endorsed by an administration but finds no backing once a new mayor is in office; other times, a developer may find total support from local politicians but fierce resistance from enraged local communities; still other times, developers must downgrade the size of their development ambitions or negotiate concessions to the community for their visions to move ahead. But, especially in booming economic times and in thriving cities, certain interests always tend to prevail, and certain visions of the city have it easy, while others really don’t stand a chance. Resident groups may fight for decades to preserve a beloved community garden from being replaced by luxury condos, but it can take no more than two years for a million-square-foot megaproject like New York University’s 2031 expansion in the heart of Greenwich Village to be almost unanimously approved by city council.34 The truth is, cities are increasingly being built for the rich to invest in rather than for regular people to live in. This dynamic is accelerating, and doing so globally.
In the 1970s, American sociologists Harvey Molotch and John Logan described the city as a “growth machine”—a machine that is captained toward land growth by powerful coalitions of interests:
A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite. Such an elite is seen to profit through the increasing intensification of the land use of the area in which its members hold a common interest…. Governmental authority, at the local and nonlocal levels, is utilized to assist in achieving this growth at the expense of competing localities.35
According to this view, local interest groups in any given city join forces in a political machine to promote growth by boosting the market value of urban land.36 Harvey also associates the rise of urban-based class alliances of “landlords and property owners, developers and financiers, and urban governments desperate to enhance their tax base”37 with the launching of large development ventures that were initiated since the mid-1970s as a response to the threats of deindustrialization and the rise of interurban competition. The “growth machine” thesis claims that the goal of growth, in the form of profit extracted from urban land, is capable of uniting otherwise conflicting social groups into coherent local governing coalitions. These alliances are composed of actors that are more or less directly associated with the property market38 and include developers, investors, landlords, speculators, and financing and banking institutions, but also corporate businesses, cultural institutions, local policymakers, and even the local media. Among such elite groups, there is a general consensus about growth, and this consensus is so powerful that it invalidates “any alternative vision of the purpose of local government or the meaning of the community.”39 These coalitions strive to influence political decisions related to city building and to orientate the public opinion in support of their ambitious development ventures by emphasizing the value of growth as a collective good that is supposedly beneficial to all citizens.
A classic example of how growth machines have formed and functioned in the crucial post-1973 crisis years can be found in the aforementioned case of New York’s 1975 near default, when the business elites managed to seize an unprecedented degree of influence in city politics and to dictate their own agenda for the years to come. In the summer of 1975, a “crisis regime” governed by members of these elites was put in place in New York City. The state authorized the creation of the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC) headed by leaders of the banking industry, which was in charge of selling bonds issued by the city to enable cash flow to return to the city’s government, and enacted the New York State Financial Emergency Act in an attempt to bring city finances under control. The State Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB) was created, which wielded powers of oversight over city government and public authorities.40 The EFCB, which included key members of the business elites, was given full authority on all financial and fiscal decisions, including the power to approve or disapprove of labor contracts.41 A Village Voice journalist and a political consultant, Jack Newfield and Paul Du Brul, in 1977 dubbed this network of unelected power brokers New York’s “permanent government.”42 The reforms enacted by the “crisis regime” led to a balanced budget by 1978, but only at the cost of escalating social wreckage: massive layoffs resulted from the cutbacks adopted in almost every sector of public expenditures, from education to affordable housing, from health care to infrastructure maintenance. By the early 1980s, a massively downsized public service system was the enduring legacy of these reforms, which for Harvey represented “a coup by the financial institutions against the democratically elected government of New York City.”43
The growth machine theory was not alone in its analysis of the functioning of urban-based class alliances. Since the late 1980s, urban regime theory has studied how local governments and private actors have coalesced into governing coalitions through formal institutions and informal networks.44 Urban regimes emerge from the cooperation of representatives of local governments and members of the business world: while government enjoys political legitimacy and authority, business possesses the capital needed to spur development and generate jobs and revenues. A very important aspect of urban regimes is their relative stability: regimes embody orientations and coalitions that are capable of outliving different governing administrations.45 In this book, I talk of city producers.46 City producers are a network of local or extra-local individuals and social groups who have a say in the production of the urban space in a given locality because of their social, economic, and political leverage. Their scope of action is not limited to property development alone, but extends to interventions affecting the social and symbolic restructuring of the space of the city (legislation, policymaking, place marketing). They include local and extra-local authorities, the real estate and corporate industries, the media, marketing and branding agencies, and, although in different measure, the myriad neighborhood groups, civil rights organizations, nonprofits, and more or less institutionalized community-based alliances that operate within the community. City producers enjoy a position of overpowering influence in decisions affecting the production of the city. As opposed to ordinary citizens, whose access to the institutional decision-making mechanisms of urban development are prevented by their low level of political, social, and economic influence, city producers are deeply ingrained in the inner workings of the city because of their access to the corridors of power. Through lobbying, campaign contributions, promises of tax returns or job creation, and other levels of pressure, they are capable of massively influencing and affecting political decisions to their own benefit. City producers are on the front lines of urban development and are proactively engaged in “producing the city” at different levels, contributing to reshaping its social, economic, and physical fabric, as well as to manipulating its image in the media and news outlets. The power wielded by city producers in fueling the development of a brand-new urban experience is nigh on unstoppable: city producers, and the formal institutions and informal networks they consolidate, are the main engines of production of the physical, symbolic, and social space of our cities.47
In the next chapters, I will investigate the two major tools in use by New York’s city producers to re-engineer the physical, social, and symbolic space of New York City. In New York, a systematic rewriting of obsolete zoning codes (rezoning) has been used to unlock development potential in once-unprofitable working-class and ex-manufacturing districts across the five boroughs (see chapter 4). This sweeping rezoning of the city has been paralleled by the production of seductive representations of a consumerist New York experience through city branding, that have reframed the city as an attractive postindustrial, tourist-friendly destination for more affluent residents and consumers (see chapter 6). While branding strategies have contributed to produce new glittering representations of a commodified urbanity, rezoning plans have produced the physical framework where the spatial practices of a new population of city consumers occur.
In capitalist societies, increasingly more aspects of our social experience have become subject to the laws of the market. As I mentioned above, space is one of them. Capital has subjugated the space of our cities, turning it into just yet another marketable commodity.48 This commodification49 of space is quintessential to the survival of capitalism, because the profits amassed from the exploitation of land are fundamental to the process of capital accumulation: the commodification of the urban space represents a political strategy to open up new channels for capital accumulation by expanding the scope of the private market for housing, retail, infrastructure, and services.50 The privatization of municipal housing stocks, the transfer of public land ownership and management to private landlords and developers, the devolution of municipal services to private providers, the privatization of public spaces, and the establishment of public–private partnerships to support development ventures are all remarkable examples of how the local state and private actors are directly involved in creating market conditions to facilitate the exploitation of space for profit.
But, as Marx argued, “production is thus at the same time consumption, and consumption is at the same time production”:51 the consumption of space is also “productive,” as consumption has the power to constantly stimulate new cycles of investment and development. In their hunt to attract new consumers and stimulate consumption, our cities have reinvented themselves as entertainment- and consumption-based wonderlands for residents and visitors alike: the multiplication of spectacular shopping malls, entertainment zones, and even themed ethnic neighborhoods is part of an agenda that seeks to emphasize consumption as the economic engine of a city that has forsaken its industrial past.52 From New York City to Shanghai, from Tokyo to Berlin, city users are increasingly becoming consumers of a space that has been produced for them by policymakers, technocrats, urban planners, and the forces of the market.53
The Miracle of our modern age is that we do have a choice. For the first time ever, a huge number of us have the freedom and economic means to choose our place. That means we have an incredible opportunity to find the place that fits us best…. As the most mobile people in human history, we are fortunate to have an incredibly diverse menu of places—in our own country and around the world—from which to choose.54
City consumers are those high-profile individuals and social groups whose consumption patterns have the power of deeply influencing the urban development agenda. They include the “new urban classes” composed of highly mobile professionals in the knowledge-based sector of so-called creative workers,55 and, more generally, geographically mobile urban residents with higher-than-average incomes and with a strong discretionary purchasing power; local and international corporations and businesses who are enticed by city governments to locate in the city; local and extra-local property investors and developers; urban tourists; resident-consumers; and the elites of super-wealthy consumers. What these groups have in common is their social and political leverage, and the growing attention that entrepreneurial public policy pays to indulge their preferences and consumption demands. Their presence in the city is strongly encouraged by city producers, because it is through their consumption patterns that they keep the processes of capital accumulation alive. Their lifestyle concerns are increasingly determinant in the process of city building, in an era in which “quality of life is not a mere byproduct of production; it defines and drives the new processes of production.”56 Their demand for space plays a strategic role in the production of a brand-new urban space, which is constantly revolutionized by their evolving consumption practices. Thus, far from being mere passive beneficiaries of the produced space, city consumers are active producers of it. In fact, the consumption of the city fuels urban development efforts (production of adequate housing, retail, and infrastructure), legitimates policy guidelines (development blueprints and regulations intended to foster an attractive built environment), and engenders new narratives and representations of space (new sophisticated urban brands are manufactured to cater to new populations of consumers).57
Of course, there would be no city producers without city consumers: while the first strive to constantly create demand for consumption (by educating consumers through marketing and branding campaigns and by anticipating and guiding their consumption preferences), the latter’s demands for specific urban forms in turn lead to the creation of a city that is more and more tailor-suited to their expectations and desires.58 In capitalist societies, the patterns of consumption offered to consumers do not necessarily coincide with what is best for the individual, but align themselves with the goals of market expansion and capital accumulation.59 The consumerist habits of city users can hence be conditioned in order to satisfy city consumers’ insatiable demand for profit. The construction of city consumers can be powered by narratives and images propagated by the media, official branding and marketing agencies, and the private real estate industry. These industries manufacture enticing images of “business-friendly,” “green,” “vibrant,” “diverse” urban idylls that are meant to stimulate endless demand for consumption (of specific housing, services, and amenities). In this framework, architecture and urban design, together with branding and marketing efforts, are employed to sell the city as an attractive place in which to live, work, and invest.
But the symbolic and material consumption of the city constitutes the experience not only of those who have access to economic capital and are capable of influencing the urban agenda, but also of those who are disenfranchised from consumer culture. In fact, not all citizens are invited to the big party of urban consumption: those unable to participate due to their economic marginality are excluded from the “produced” city. Unequal access to consumption between “strong” and “weak” consumers results in different degrees of political empowerment and different abilities to actively influence the dominant agenda of consumption-based development. As a result, unequal access to consumption comes to determine new forms of social inclusion or exclusion in the city.60
While the consumption patterns of powerful consumers are increasingly dictating the agenda of urban development, other city users are all too often merely abiding by the arrangements of an urban agenda that is not speaking in their name. This is why the rise in political leverage and consuming power of city consumers challenges common notions of citizenship, in an urban society where the inability to consume comes to define new forms of social disenfranchisement and new geographies of segregation.
Gentrification has become quite the buzzword of our urban age. We all know stories of infamous urban ghettos that were once plagued with crime and poverty and that suddenly have morphed into fashionable hot spots for artists and hipsters, or stories of a beloved neighborhood that was once bustling with life and color and was gradually converted into a dull, off-limits enclave for the wealthy alone.
According to urban scholar Neil Smith, by the 1990s gentrification evolved into a global development strategy, sponsored by local governments from the global North to the global South:61 today, “gentrification blueprints,” under the guise of municipal strategies for “livability” or “sustainability,” are advanced more or less explicitly by all local authorities willing to compete in the global marketplace.62 The advocates of such strategies routinely emphasize the benefits of their pro-gentrification policies, like increased tax revenues to support municipal services, increased average incomes to sustain commerce and keep the economy vibrant, increased home equity benefiting homeowners, and increased order, cleanliness, and safety in neighborhoods that were once underserved and in disrepair. But they routinely dismiss or overlook their downsides, like the displacement of long-time residents and businesses.
The role of the public sector as the “enabler” of gentrification is that of easing the regulatory boundaries that may prevent it, for example, by loosening strict zoning regulations (rezoning), by creating special development districts or enterprise zones, or by granting direct subsidies to encourage private ventures in underperforming areas. Gentrification is also promoted by government-led strategies of urban branding, which under the various banners of “urban renaissance,” “urban revival,” and the like, call attention to assets and perks of gentrifying districts.
This is why I define gentrification quite succinctly as “the process through which city producers produce a space to be consumed by city consumers.” In this context, gentrified space is produced both in response to the demands of specific consumers and as an active producer of such demands. This physical space includes not only fashionable housing for the newcomers but also a fully redesigned urban landscape that is rich in entertainment and consumption opportunities for the new consumers.
Neil Smith saw gentrification as a restructuring process that allows global capital not only to penetrate the urban cores of our cities but also to infiltrate any remaining urban frontier, including peripheral, off-limits neighborhoods, in its perpetual search for profit.63 This is the case of New York City under the administrations of Bloomberg and de Blasio, where gentrification, far from being a localized phenomenon occurring in specific central areas, has become a vast, generalized, and geographically pervasive urban restructuring operation. As I will explain in chapter 4, these administrations have implicitly promoted the wholesale gentrification of New York City as an engine of economic growth. Much of their development policies have been based on the re-engineering of peripheral and underperforming property markets to encourage high-end investment and the influx of new, more affluent city consumers. By promoting gentrification across the board, the city has enabled capital to penetrate in residual and disadvantaged communities across the five boroughs, leading to their physical, social, and symbolic makeover.